worryingly jolly batman

I only have six more books to read this year before I'll have officially read 100 books this year (not including books I'd read before, novel-length fanfic, or comics I read as single issues; including trades and cover-to-cover poetry). I'm half-way or more than half-way through Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker, Dead People's Music by Sarah Laing, Going Bovine by Libba Bray and Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon and I've read just over half of the stories in the (admittedly giant-sized) James Tiptree, Jr anthology Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. (I think I've raved about this anthology before, but it is just fucking amazing. You need it in your life if you like any of these things: a) speculative fiction b) women c) intelligent death-plagues d) neat clean smart brilliant writing.)

Despite this, yesterday and today I binge-read Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Towers of Midnight. And I do mean binge: started it late in the evening, read til 5 am, woke up at 11, read til 5 pm. (Mini, non-spoilery review: a) Everyone's awesome again! b) Brandon Sanderson Gets Plot-Related Shit Done. Coming from the perspective of someone who no longer cares about prophecies, who killed Asmodean, or what exactly that one dream Egwene had one time means, this is basically 100% of everything I'm looking for in Wheel of Time books now: a rehabilitation of my favourite characters after they were all progressively Spikified, and to know what happens to them and ideally that they all live happily ever after. Spoiler: Nynaeve does not cry soppily in this book. It's terrible to feel that Sanderson is writing these people as more in-character than Jordan was in the last three or four books, but that is kind of how I feel.)

Anyway the problem is that now, instead of picking up the millions of books I'm part-way through, I'm instead fondling the beautiful-looking A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse as well as 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson and A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer, which frankly has a hideous cover but I could quite go for some silly epic fantasy that won't take me the rest of the year to read (Traitor's Gate by Kate Elliot is at the bottom of my to-read pile propping the rest of it up...). Also I have Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X Stork and The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame out from the library.

So you guys should tell me what to read! You always give me good advice.



What are you reading lately?